VMware is no longer offering vSphere Foundation in some parts of EMEA. Smaller customers in particular are affected and have to look for an alternative.
In some countries within the EMEA region, VMware is discontinuing vSphere Foundation (VVF). This was discovered by The Register. VVF includes VMware solutions for compute, storage and network. The virtualization suite is aimed at HCI environments and contains less functionality than VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).
Broadcom is not exactly clarifying the situation and confirms that VVF is indeed no longer available in ‘some countries’. Customers should contact their partner or vendor to find out what the situation is. Broadcom says the changes are ‘recent’.
Ten times more expensive
VVF is less extensive than VCF and therefore also more affordable. Broadcom has no interest in marketing its solutions in customized packages, priced according to the needs of smaller companies. The company only wants to sell the all-encompassing VCF to the very largest organizations worldwide. The rest of the historical customers are the victims. License costs to achieve the same increase due to the unsolicited bundling of services, sometimes by a factor of ten.
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That is also the premium mentioned by the initial anonymous source of The Register. The whistleblower has several thousand compute cores and pays $130,000 annually in license fees for VVF. If VVF disappears and the customer has to switch to VCF, the license cost will increase to $1.3 million.
To Nutanix or Microsoft
That puts smaller companies in a difficult position. Please note: in the context of VMware, smaller means anything but small. Organizations with hundreds of employees and licenses for thousands of cores still fall under the definition of small shrimp for Broadcom.
Escaping from the current situation is difficult and requires a quick migration. Broadcom’s strategy seems to be aimed at putting customers under time pressure with announced changes and adjusted contracts, which complicates the whole situation. However, the factor by which the licenses can increase will leave some companies with no choice.
The company The Register spoke to is considering switching to Microsoft Hyper-V or Nutanix. Nutanix is certainly doing everything it can to make such a switch as painless as possible. For the time being, vSphere Standard will remain available in EMEA, although Broadcom cannot guarantee the offer in the long term. Anyone who is not on VCF at the moment would do well to have an exit strategy ready.